Review of The Passenger

Jack Nicholson plays a television reporter so exhausted and overwhelmed by life that he fakes his own death and assumes another man's identity. Unfortunately, that new role is tangled in more political tripwires than a moth in a spiderweb and he's almost immediately navigating some very tricky waters. Extremely vacant storytelling is the rule of the day here, with a Camus-like degree of passivity. In retrospect, or particularly during the great climax that closes the film, it becomes clear that there are a surprising number of independently moving pieces key to the plot. The problem is in how casually they sneak up on the viewer. For all its cinematic beauty, deep existential ruminations and whirling asides, this is a very dull, slow-moving picture that's painfully deliberate at times. That ultimately makes it inaccessible to most and largely unrewarding to those who stick with it to the end. Of course, the famed single-cut panorama at the very end is a true revelation - it elegantly snips away every remaining plot thread in a delicate, mesmerizing display of technique - but seven minutes of perfection isn't enough to overcome the preceding two hours of bland dawdling.